How I Learned to Deal With My Toddler's Night Terrors

Remember when I ran that post about the movieWhat To Expect When You're Expecting? I'm still waiting for my date night to get out and see it! Why? Because I absolutely loved the book series that spawned a big cinematic debut — even if some of those ladies are missing underarm fat.

I've put the What To Expect Books on all of my "Loved These Books" lists. When it comes to influencing my life as a parent and as a person, there are only a few that really knocked me over — and those include the crazy funny books by Bill Bryson, the deeply cosmic quantum ponderings of Stephen Hawking, the long-since-passed-book-phase of Ayn Rand, and my more recent infatuation with the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series.

Seriously, I want to tell you how the What To Expect: The Toddler Years impacted our lives in a very real and positive way.

We had our children about 19 months apart. Our daughter, the oldest, was still very attached to me by the time her brother was born. She was still very much a baby in need of her mother. Her brother's brief hospitalization forced a very stressful separation between us.

At night, our 19-month old, for the first time ever, appeared to be having violent tantrums. They seemed uncontrollable. Even in the hospital, while napping or late at night when she fell asleep in the bed next to me, she would awaken and sink into a horrible, fist-throwing tantrum. Doctors and nurses came into the room to check to be sure that our daughter wasn't being mistreated because she sounded like she was in such distress. No one could seem to reach her to calm her down.

For about a month, we didn't understand what was happening. We thought she was jealous. We thought she was angry. We put her in time-out. We pleaded. We consoled. We yelled back and in frustration. But, nothing seemed to work.

And, then one day, I happened to read a quick passage in the What To Expect series about the difference between "Night Terrors" (where the child's sleep is disturbed but they are still ASLEEP and won't remember the incident) and "Nightmares" (where the child is awake and can remember the incident the next morning.)

Like everything had happened in Technicolor, we could see there had always been a pattern of behavior with each and every single episode.

-Our daughter always woke up abruptly.

-She sat straight up in the bed.

-She turned to all four sides of the room and acted scared.

-She acted like she didn't know where she was.

-She would run for the door and she would try desperately to escape.

-We would pull her off the doorknob, which she would hang from and cling to trying to get out.

-And she didn't respond like she normally did to our pleas and demands to stop.

-It was like she couldn't hear us.

-And then, she would look at us quietly and promptly pass out on our shoulders like nothing had happened.

She doesn't have them anymore, Thank Goodness.

But reading that one helpful page in the series really changed how we responded to her if she had a night terror.

We didn't yell. We didn't judge. We definitely did not punish with an ineffective time-out.

We put our arms around her to protect her. We sat down with her. We didn't talk to her. We waited for the terror to pass. And then we put her to bed.

Another blogger , Jamie of Hands On: As We Grow, recently wrote about her experience with night terrors in We Get It: Night Terrors.

Night terrors are scary episodes, mostly for us parents, but recognizing what is happening goes a long, long way in easing our own fears and feelings of failure.

I am ever thankful that someone, some parent, had the foresight to put that helpful little page in that helpful, big book for us.

It truly helped our family — and our emotional well-being.

So, yep — The What To Expect series of books — they're up there on my bookshelf.

Right next to my tattered copies of The Universe In A Nutshell and We The Living.

Life-changing, this stuff. It really is.

Written by Tricia Driscoll

Tricia is a former Army Officer and research analyst turned mom writer-blogger at <a href="http://crittersandcrayons.com/">Critters And Crayons</a>, a blog about humor in parenting, crafting, play, and education. Her site is about &#8220;Enjoying Life: Wherever We Happen To Land&#8221; which happens to be Laredo, Texas, a place where parents can find local resources and activities promoted on the Critters And Crayons Blog. She aims to find the funny in the everyday, and in particular, the most humorless of parenting situations.